The role of governmental risk aversion in the decision to privatize the production of goods and services has not been examined closely. Using a model of a risk-averse, single-service Niskanen bureaucrat, the authors determine the conditions under which a bureaucrat will prefer to privatize...

The lack of simple language to describe the structure of intergovernmental grant programs and a failure to recognize that such programs are chosen by legislators whose preferences differ from those of recipients has led to an inability to develop a theory of why intergovernmental grants exist...

Based on a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision, U.S. courts have attempted to get Mississippi's university system to remove vestiges of its segregated past. However, they have been constrained by the willingness of the legislature to comply. Using spatial voting theory, this paper predicts that if...

There are two troubling and largely unrecognized implications of the generalized CES production function when there are increasing returns to scale and the elasticity of substitution (𝜎) exceeds one: (1) under these conditions the CES production function is always inconsistent with the law of...

Nest-leaving—the transition of young adults from their parents’ homes to other living arrangements—is a major life-course milestone. Although the causes of nest-leaving have been extensively researched, only a few studies have examined the changes in young adults’ own assessments of...

Additional work hours may lead to weight gain by decreasing exercise, causing substitution from meals prepared at home to fast food and pre-prepared processed food, or reducing sleep. Substitution toward unhealthy convenience foods could also influence the weight of one's spouse and children,...

I examine the relationship between student debt and the timing of marriage. The life-cycle consumption smoothing model implies that student loans should have a very small effect on consumption at any given point in time and should not affect the timing of family formation. I use the Survey of...

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This paper examines parents and children in the longitudinal Panel Study of Income Dynamics and PSID-Child Development Supplement to identify how a child's level of skills is affected by the onset of a negative parental health event. I estimate effects for two measures of health events—the...

This paper estimates the demand for beer in the U.S. from 2001 until 2006 using a multinomial logit discrete-choice model of product differentiation. Using grocery store scanner data from Information Resources Incorporated (IRI), demand estimates are used to evaluate the extent to which two new...